The hobbit in my opinion seems too advanced to be a "bed time story for kids" y'know. It's pretty intense litterature. I was about 11 or 12 already when I took it on and I thought of it at that point as a fairly challenging read.

I did see a few Tolkien documentaries where they interviewed alot of people from Finland about the language there and how Tolkien used it.

I wonder why he got the interest in it to begin with (making his own languages and so forth). He definately found his calling with "language studies"

He started to learn languages in very early age, as his mother taught him. From the start he seemed to pay attention on how the words sound, in the same way as musician pays attention to rhythm and melody. He used to detach words' meanings from their sound, just to examine their "aesthetics". He was basically a composer of his own language "music", and he was developing elvish all through his life.

That's beautiful. I head that "cellar door" is one of the most beautifulphrases in the English language. I guess poetry is music just without the notes and so forth. Tolkiens poems always had such amaizing descriptions especially of the scenery that surrounded the characters.

If any of you are a bit into Finnish/Russian mythology (Kalevala) you will also notice that one of the heroes in this saga is a bit like Gandalf. Väinämöinen. He's old, dressed in grey, has lived since the earth was created (if I don't remember it wrong).

There can be found some similarities between Väinämöinen and wizards in fantasy literature, first and foremost among them Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Both are unearthly sages of divine origins, both in possession of unearthly knowledge, both vigorous, old and bearded. Another wizard of Tolkien's, Saruman the White, possessed a great power of voice and persuasion, which also somewhat mirrors Väinämöinen's (who was able to charm all manner of woodland creatures with his song and kantele). Tolkien indicated that his stories of Túrin Turambar were a retelling of the Kullervo myth from Kalevala so it is possible that similarities between Gandalf and Väinämöinen were intentional or unconscious rather than coincidental. Other fantasy authors borrowed from Tolkien, thus resulting in various second-generation similarities.